cannabisnews.com: Prison Drug Treatment Unpopular, But It Works!





Prison Drug Treatment Unpopular, But It Works!
Posted by FoM on February 05, 1999 at 11:03:00 PT

The $10 million expansion of the California prison system's scientifically validated drug treatment program is running into resistance from the people it's supposed to help.Many prisoners, about 80 percent of those who have been invited to attend, want nothing to do with a program hailed as one of the best things the state has ever developed to keep paroled substance-abusing inmates from returning.
But whether they like it or not, the prisoners don't have a whole lot of say in the matter. If they refuse, they lose -- both good-time credits and privileges like conjugal visits and yard time. "It was either do it or don't do it," said Michael Fernandez, an inmate at California State Prison, Solano, who was forced into drug treatment even though he says he doesn't have a drug problem. "And I'm not here to pick up more time, so you have to accept it."Prison officials said it's another case of inmates not knowing what's best for them. The inmates may kick and scream on their way into the programs, officials said. But studies show the screamers and kickers will eventually get over it and maybe even get better."Involuntary treatment has been used just about nationwide in order to deal with this problem, and the results are generally that coercive treatment works as well as voluntary treatment," said John Erickson, the Department of Corrections' assistant director in charge of substance abuse programs. "They may go in involuntarily, but -- we see it all the time -- as their participation goes on, their attitudes change."Backed by studies documenting sharply reduced rates of reoffending, prison officials have fully embraced the concept of institutional "therapeutic community" drug treatment programs that are geometrically spreading throughout the system. Their enthusiasm was spawned by a study on the in-prison program at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County. The study showed that only 16 percent of its graduates who also completed an aftercare program came back into the system within two years of their release. The statewide recidivism rate is about 70 percent.With numbers like those, prison officials blasted forward in drug-treatment expansion mode. In 1997, they increased the number of drug treatment beds from the 200 at Donovan to another 1,400 opening at the new Corcoran prison. Last year, another 3,000 such beds were authorized statewide, including 1,000 in yet-to-be constructed private prisons.So far, drug treatment has come on line in 200-bed contracts at Solano, California State Prison, Los Angeles, the California Correctional Women's Facility in Chowchilla and the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown.Each program has an annual cost of about $750,000. They're operated by private residential drug-treatment contractors such as Center Point Transitions, the Amity Foundation of California (which ran the Donovan program) and Walden House. The programs, in which inmates spend four hours a day, last from six to 18 months. They are marked by intensive group encounter sessions, facilitated by staffs of ex-users.At Donovan, all of the participants volunteered. But as the program has been expanded to the other prisons, officials are discovering a major reticence in the inmates' ranks. Authorities said fully 80 percent of the participants had to be invited under threat. "A lot of it has to do with the job assignments they already have," said Jerry Mobery, the correctional counselor who is in charge of substance abuse programs at Solano. "Like a lot of us, they're complacent with where they are. They're content being porters or tier tenders. They don't like change."Inmates who RSVP in the negative are being told that their alternative to drug treatment is what they call "C-Status" classification. That means they stand to lose time credits that cut their sentences by one-third to one-half. Telephone calls, special packages, overnight family visits -- all are taken away if the inmate refuses the program. Their yard time is cut.At Solano, if inmate attitudes are changing about drug treatment, it appears that they've been mostly for the worse.Incarcerated for selling methamphetamine, inmate Fernandez, 29, of San Mateo, insists he is not an addict, that his drug use was only "a weekend thing." He was forced into treatment when the Solano program got under way in October. Three months later, he still wants out -- resentful, he said, of the program's prodding and probing into his inner being, into his family, psychological and sexual histories."It's very stressful on the mind," Fernandez said.Fernandez, however, is staying in the program rather than lose his time credits and privileges. Tolliver Lyons, 44, a second-degree robber out of Sacramento, refused to join. He wound up on C-Status."I had a job (in the laundry) and I was minding my own business," Lyons said. "To disrupt the program I was in doesn't make any sense."Some inmates said they were taken out of vocational programs that taught them trades and were put in drug treatment they resent."I was on the verge of becoming a computer technician," said Anthony Alford, 22, doing a five-year term on an alcohol-related shooting. "Now when I get out, I will have completed a drug program, but I'll have no job skills."Prison officials and drug-treatment researchers say they've got 30 years of research to back up their contention that the programs work, even with the clientele coming in under the auspice of coercion -- and sometimes directly because of it."You'll get a lot of complaining in the first 30 to 60 days, then things will settle down, if the program is good," said Douglas Anglin, director of the UCLA Drug Abuse Research Center. "When you follow them up five years later, coerced clients, in every well-designed study, they do better than voluntary clients. These are very well-established findings."Still, forced treatment does raise some concerns with inmates-rights advocates."If the department is truly interested in motivating those who have resistance to these kinds of programs, they should provide incentives, not penalties," said Steve Fama, an attorney with the Prison Law Office.Some drug abuse experts also believe that therapeutic communities, with sometimes confrontational settings and forced disclosure of intimate details of participants' lives, may not be for everybody. Diana Bogard, director of residential substance abuse services for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics in San Francisco, thinks "TCs" work great for hard-core addicts "who can't get clean in any other modality." But she said its heavy group dynamics could mean "the kiss of death" for somebody who can't stand up to the rigors."Anybody who is forced into anything is probably not going to benefit from it," Bogard said, speaking as an individual and not as a clinic spokeswoman.Faced with the nation's worst recidivism rate and buttressed by surveys showing that 70 percent of inmates have drug problems, prison officials say they are obligated to push forward with drug treatment. And, if they have to, they'll do it by force."Some of these folks are happy as hell with their lifestyles, abusing society," said Michael Pickett, the Department of Corrections' Northern California regional director. "If we could get just a 40 percent success rate with them, as a taxpayer, I'd be ecstatic. If we can do something about them, I don't care if they volunteer or not."
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